An increasing number of anthropologists have turned their attention in recent years to the topic of altered states of consciousness, with the result that an extensive list of pharmacologically active substances capable of inducing such states has now been compiled. However, virtually all hallucinogenic materials reported so far in ethnographic contexts have been botanical in origin, even though the wide range of substances and techniques (e.g., sensory deprivation, pain, etc.) used in various areas of the world argues for lengthy and extensive experimentation with most facets of the environment on the part of many generations of native scholars. Reports of apparent hallucinogenic agents of a non-botanical nature should therefore be of more than passing interest, particularly when the ethnographic context involved is California.

Louis Choris was one of the most talented artists of California Native American life during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Recently, a previously unknown watercolor by Choris was discovered at the Estonian History Museum. This discovery highlights the importance of searching for further undiscovered treasures in European repositories.

Alexander W. Chase carried out substantive, pioneering anthropological research during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and was a major contributor to Stephen Powers' classic monograph Tribes of California, yet his name is little recognized today. The recent discovery of some early Chase photographs, as well as a previously unknown newspaper article written by him, sheds new light on his career and contributes to a greater appreciation for his accomplishments.

The particular case of Chumash rock art is suggestive if inconclusive. Grant (1965) has described the pictographs and petroglyphs of the Santa Barbara hinterland in some detail, and has isolated most of the design elements utilized by the native artists. These design elements (many of which are shown in Fig. 3) seem to me to be often strikingly similar to the experimentally induced phosphenes in Fig. 1, although I am not enough of an artist to make the kind of rigorous stylistic comparison of the two motif sets that would be desirable. However, the similarities appear to be extensive and systematic, and I feel that they provide additional support to the suggestion that many of the paintings were inspired by hallucinatory phenomena associated with the ingestion of Datura inoxia. Future research on Chumash rock art might explore this hypothesis further, and utilize as well our newly acquired information concerning the nature of Chumash myth and ritual (Blackburn 1976; Hudson et al. 1977). It seems likely to me that what we are seeing in much of Chumash rock art are individual expressions of mythological themes or characters as "seen" or experienced by the artists as a direct or indirect consequence of ingesting a known hallucinogenic substance. The universal visual phenomena, phosphenes, provide basic stimuli which are filtered through the screen of cultural interpretation and myth to provide powerful religious symbols; to fully interpret these, we must learn more in the future about both the biopsychological aspects of the art and the intervening cultural screen, and about the process of interaction between the two. Here studies of contemporary situations involving the ritual use of psychoactive substances (such as Reichel-Dolmatoffs pioneering work among the Tukano) should be of considerable help. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future we will be able to approach prehistoric art in a new way, and not just look, but see.

In the Winter, 1974 issue of the Journal (p. 186), there appeared a photograph, originally taken by Leon de Cessac in 1878, of an Ineseno Chumash man dressed in ceremonial regalia. Since the individual shown is somewhat misleadingly identified in the Journal as a "Chumash shaman," and since the particular photograph has been reproduced several times in recent years (Reichlen and Heizer 1964; Grant 1965), I feel that it might be useful to correct the record and add further data to what little is presently available.

Although the mission system established by the Spanish in California has been a topic of considerable interest to both scholars and students alike for many years, and a great deal of information is available on certain specific aspects of mission life, it remains regrettably true that no phase of native history of comparable significance is more poorly represented in terms of primary documentation. With a few notable exceptions (such as a Boscana, Arroyo de la Cuesta, or Longinos Martinez), the participants and observers of the tragic events of the mission period seem to have seen little of intrinsic value or interest in native culture per se, or indeed in the people themselves as human beings, rather than simply converts or laborers. Consequently, the kinds of data available for anthropological or historic analysis are limited, sparse, systematically biased, and usually fail to provide the type of in-depth perspective that can sometimes be extracted from such sources. The publication of a native account of an important historic incident during the mission period—the Chumash revolt of 1824—should therefore be of particular interest to many, since it does supply a rare glimpse of native responses and attitudes toward the system which exploited them economically and destroyed them culturally.

There can be little doubt that religious beliefs (and the ritual practices associated with them) constituted exceptionally important elements in the daily lives of the native peoples of south-central California. Complex mythologies, elaborate cosmographies, and interlocking belief systems served to link both the individual and the community with the realm of the sacred, and in turn were given dramatic expression (in both concrete and abstract form) by shamans, priests, and various other ritualists. The primary setting for these community-oriented religious activities was the "fiesta," a complex of events which also constituted an important medium for significant social, political, economic, and aesthetic interaction (Blackburn 1974; Bean 1972). These ceremonial occasions appear in fact to have drawn many different communities into a coherent yet flexible network of interacting subsystems that transcended normal ethnic, political, and linguistic boundaries. It seems clear to us that a reconstruction of this system, involving both a delimitation of the constituent components and a description of their integration, should be a major goal for future ethnohistoric research in the region; however, it seems equally clear that a necessary prerequisite to the achievement of this goal must be a general overview of the ideological bases (i.e., ritual practices and mythological beliefs) which served as the primary rationale for ceremonial interaction. We hope that the present paper will serve as an initial step toward the ultimate achievement of just such an overview.